Staring at an empty editor is the hardest part. Here's what each section is for, in the order they appear.
Personal information
Your name, a professional email, a phone number, and your city and country or region.
Put these in the body of your resume — which is where we put them — not in a page header or footer. Screening systems don't always read headers reliably.
Add a LinkedIn URL or a portfolio link if it's genuinely worth clicking. Skip your full street address, your date of birth, and your marital status.
Professional summary
Two or three sentences on who you are professionally and what you're aiming at. It's optional, and it's the section most often wasted on adjectives. If yours would only say "hard-working professional seeking new challenges", cut it. See do you need a professional summary?
Work experience
The heart of it. For each role: company, job title, dates, and two to five bullet points.
Bullets should say what you did and what happened as a result, not restate your job description. Reverse-chronological order — most recent first — is what both recruiters and screening systems expect, and it's the order we lay out for you. See writing bullets that land.
If a role is old or unrelated, it can be one line with no bullets at all. You don't owe every job equal space.
Education
Institution, qualification, and dates. Early in your career this can sit high and carry detail — relevant coursework, a thesis, an honour worth naming. Ten years in, it's usually two lines.
Skills
The tools, languages, and methods you'd be comfortable being asked about in an interview.
Keep it to things you can evidence. A skills list is the easiest place on a resume to overclaim and the easiest place for an interviewer to test. If a skill matters, it should also show up inside a bullet where you actually used it — that's what a reader credits.
Projects
Useful when your paid work doesn't show the range you want, or when you're early in your career. Same shape as work experience: what it was, what you did, what came of it.
Certifications
Name, issuing body, and date. Best for credentials that are asked for by name in postings you're targeting.
Custom sections
Anything real that doesn't fit above — publications, languages, volunteering, speaking, patents. Name them plainly. See custom sections.
Good to know
- Empty sections don't print. Leave the ones that don't apply blank rather than deleting anything.
- Section order is fixed, so you can't accidentally bury your experience below your hobbies.
- What you write is portable — switching templates never costs you a word.